Page 38 - NyghtVision Magazine Volume 3 #1

38 LIGHTING THE UN-LIGHTABLE

t had been a very cloudy day, and the sud- would be more difficult to “see.” Preserving
den burst of light forced me to rethink my the wood’s detail was an important part of the
I entire approach to lighting the scene. Al- visual—and therefore emotional—experience.
though I liked the streaming sunlight, I knew Conventional wisdom suggests we expose
that if I didn’t use it effectively, my images for the midtones. In theory, exposing for the
would not turn out the way I hoped. midtones balances the camera’s rendering of
I could see that the light from the window the shadows and highlights most effectively.
was reflecting from the door onto Innana. I However, that doesn’t usually work when the
liked the effect—the mask she wore glowed in difference between the highlights and the shad-
the warm light as did her skin. I knew from ex- ows is more than two f-stops. Figure 1 shows
perience that while my eyes didn’t have a prob- what happened when I tried this approach. The
lem with the way the light was reflecting off the door was so overexposed that nearly all the de-
door, the camera would. tail was lost.
There were three potential problems: (1) If Exposing for the highlights wasn’t an option
I set my exposure for Inanna’s skin, dress, and either. Figure 2 on the previous page shows ex-
mask, the door would likely be washed out. (2) cellent detail in the door, but the shadows be-
If I set my exposure for the door, Innana would hind Innana are far too dark. It’s possible that
inevitably be too dark. (3) Since I wanted the if I had pushed exposure or some other setting
scene to look natural—just the way I saw it—I in Optics Pro, I could have retrieved more detail
couldn’t let my use of the door as a reflector be in the shadow. However, that would come at a
too obvious. price—as even in Optics Pro there would have
been some noise or loss of detail. A tool such as

THINKING THROUGH THE PROBLEM NIK’s Viveza might have helped me pull more
Before we begin, I would like to note that the detail out of the shadows after that, although
first photo on the previous page (Figure 1) was there would still be residual noise and other
created using only ambient light. I had to raise problems to fix. The end result, after hours of
my ISO significantly, and this in turn made work, may possibly have been a decent image,
the camera overly sensitive to the difference however it would have taken considerable time
between the shadows behind Innana and the and effort to correct a problem that should have
brightness of the door. The RAW image was been taken care of before I created the photo.
significantly modified using DxO Optics Pro Using a flash would have helped, but even a
Elite in order to compensate for all the prob- flash on the camera with a diffuser leaves a no-
lems. Still, as you can see, there is almost no de- ticeable “ring” with heavy shadows around the
tail in the door and the overall composition is edges. Plus, using a flash may have created ad-
weak. The viewer’s eye goes to the light on the ditional problems as well. For example, light
door and not to Innana. from the flash would strike the door first, then
The problem wasn’t just the light reflecting be reflected back to the camera. This would
off the door (although I don’t want to downplay have created a “hot spot” on the door that
how significantly this complicated matters), it could well have made the issue worse. Again,
was that, to the camera’s eye, the intensity of I could have chosen to address these problems
the reflected light would make the shadows in post-processing, but there would still be im-
behind her darker and the detail of the wood age quality issues to come to terms with.

nyghtvision magazine volume 3, number 1, WINTER 2013